Subjective Evaluation of Frame Rate in Bitrate-Constrained Live Streaming

2026-01-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the trade-off between compression intensity and frame rate in bandwidth-constrained live streaming, where their joint impact on subjective perceptual quality remains unclear. To this end, we present HFR-LS, the first high-frame-rate subjective quality dataset tailored for low-bitrate live streaming, comprising 384 1080p video samples spanning multiple combinations of bitrates and frame rates. User ratings were collected using the single-stimulus hidden reference methodology. Our work systematically reveals, for the first time, the interaction among frame rate, bitrate, and source content characteristics in shaping perceived quality. Experimental results demonstrate that frame rate significantly influences subjective quality, with this effect modulated jointly by bitrate and content properties, thereby providing empirical evidence and a foundational dataset to guide optimized encoding strategies for live video streaming.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Image and Video Retrieval
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Qualitative Reasoning
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Bandwidth constraints in live streaming require video codecs to balance compression strength and frame rate, yet the perceptual consequences of this trade-off remain underexplored. We present the high frame rate live streaming (HFR-LS) dataset, comprising 384 subject-rated 1080p videos encoded at multiple target bitrates by systematically varying compression strength and frame rate. A single-stimulus, hidden-reference subjective study shows that frame rate has a noticeable effect on perceived quality, and interacts with both bitrate and source content. The HFR-LS dataset is available at https://github.com/real-hjq/HFR-LS to facilitate research on bitrate-constrained live streaming.

Problem

• live streaming
• frame rate
• bitrate constraint
• subjective evaluation
• perceived quality

Innovation

• frame rate
• bitrate-constrained streaming
• subjective quality evaluation
• video compression
• live streaming